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About SBL

The Society of Biblical Literature is the oldest and largest international scholarly membership organization in the field of biblical studies. Founded in 1880, the Society has grown to over 8,500 international members including teachers, students, religious leaders and individuals from all walks of life who share a mutual interest in the critical investigation of the Bible.

Texts and Resources

Biblical scholars are fundamentally indebted to the work
of text-critics. Texts and resources
for this work are available to SBL members on this page, and SBL is grateful to
the partnership with the German Bible Society that makes these available.

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Textual Resources
from the German Bible Society

The decades-long commitment of
the German Bible Society has produced the staples that have nourished
generations of biblical scholars and translators. The booklet Textual
Research on the Bible highlights this work. Through a
partnership with the German Bible Society, the reading texts (upper texts,
without critical apparatus) of four editions are available to SBL members in
several formats for download and personal use.

SBL in association with Logos Bible Software
offers a new, critically edited Greek New Testament in electronic and print formats. See more information on the relationship between
the SBLGNT and the UBS and Nestle-Aland texts below.

The text of
the SBLGNT has been encoded in a Unicode-compliant font so users can exchange
files easily without having to secure a special Greek font. Users may use SBLGreek or any other Unicode
font that supports the full range of Greek characters.

SBL has collaborated with many organizations and
individuals to develop a series of high-quality fonts for digital and print use. This
series includes SBL BibLit, which combines Greek, Hebrew, and Latin characters,
including transliteration diacritics, SBL Greek, a Greek-specific font, and SBL
Hebrew, a Hebrew-specific font. These fonts, an FAQ page, font support contact,
and a user agreement for commercial use are available here.

* A
Note Regarding the Relationship between the SBLGNT and the NA and UBS Texts

The Greek New
Testament: SBL Edition (SBLGNT) is not a standard critical edition of the
Greek New Testament; rather, it is a critically edited edition. Instead of its
apparatus recording variants readings among manuscripts, it records differences
in other published editions of the Greek New Testament. In so doing, the SBLGNT
is a "reading edition" that alerts readers to text-critical issues.

With regard to its text,
the Greek New Testament: SBL Edition
(SBLGNT) stands as an alternative to, for example, the NA26-27 and
UBS3-4-5 editions (identical since 1975). Given that all these
editions in different ways trace their roots back to the influential edition
and methods of Westcott & Hort, it is no surprise that they present a
similar text in many respects. In the more than 540 places where the SBLGNT
differs from the others, however, the differences are generally due to the
circumstance that the SBLGNT reflects a somewhat different approach to textual
criticism, particularly with regard to the history of the transmission of the text,
than that followed by the editorial committee responsible for the NA26-27
and UBS3-4-5 texts (to the extent that that approach is exhibited in
the Textual Commentary edited by
Bruce M. Metzger on behalf of the editorial committee and in the Alands’ volume
on The Text of the New Testament),
and therefore sometimes reaches a different assessment of the evidence.

With respect to its apparatus,
the SBLGNT stands in a complementary relationship to the apparatuses presented
respectively by the NA26-27 and UBS3-4-5 editions. The
future format of a critical apparatus is likely to be electronic and linked to
online manuscript evidence. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to invest
resources in this type of limited apparatus of manuscript evidence. It would be
inappropriate, however, to leave the reader of the SBLGNT with no guide to the
places where the manuscript tradition exhibits noteworthy variation. So a
decision was reached to present an apparatus displaying the textual decisions
of five editions of the Greek NT. This apparatus informs the reader of the
presence of selected textual variants, concisely indicates how representative
editions have handled the matter, and alerts the reader of the need to consult
a fuller apparatus—such as those presented in the NA and UBS editions—for more
information about the variants and the evidence supporting them.